What unfolded from 1945-1950 was intensely political, caught up in Cold War intrigue and the founding of the state of Israel....
As Shephard shows, the DP issue had global implications and not only in the Near East. Many non-Jewish displaced persons — Poles, Balts, Ukrainians, some of whom had collaborated with Germany — were reluctant to return to communist-dominated Eastern Europe. They made their way to jobs in Belgium and Great Britain; others journeyed as far as Australia. The United States was a popular choice, but anti-immigrant sentiment delayed the arrival of significant numbers of DPs. In the end, the United States took some 380,000 of them.